Election Day

With less than 24 hours to go until we freeze our model, we're probably not going to see a lot more changes in the topline forecast. Republicans have a 54 ...

[wasn’t really all that bad](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-just-a-normal-polling-error-behind-clinton/), and pollsters had a semi-decent array of excuses from shifts in voter coalitions that made it important to weight polls by educational attainment to a crazy [October and November news cycle, including the Comey letter](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/). [considerably more likely to turn out to vote](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/2020-presidential-election-voting-and-registration-tables-now-available.html#:~:text=High%20school%20graduate%20turnout%20was,that%20were%20not%20significantly%20different.). [CNN’s recent generic ballot poll](https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/02/politics/cnn-poll-gop-congressional-election/index.html), for instance, 2 points from [Siena College and The New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/us/politics/republicans-economy-nyt-siena-poll.html), and 1 point from [Echelon Insights](https://echeloninsights.com/in-the-news/2022-omnibus-october/). [generic ballot tracker](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/) combines what are really two types of polls. But the track record of vibes is that they’re somewhere between useless and worse-than-useless, like in 2016 when [insiders thought Hillary Clinton would have a cakewalk](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-you-shouldnt-always-trust-the-inside-scoop/). In Marquette’s more recent [poll](https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2022/11/02/mlsp74-press-release/), however, Johnson led by 3 among registered voters but actually lost a point and led by 2 among likely voters. Also, to the extent that polls do have a house effect — that is, [consistently leaning toward Democrats or Republicans](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/calculating-house-effects-of-polling-firms/) — our model adjusts for it. Meanwhile, an NBC News [poll](https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read/nbc-news-poll-democrats-catch-gop-enthusiasm-rcna55859) had the generic ballot tied among registered voters but Democrats 1 point ahead among likely voters, meaning that there was actually a tiny enthusiasm gap in Democrats’ favor. [the “Nathan Redd” argument](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-case-for-a-republican-sweep-on-election-night/) that as polling gets more difficult, you should put more faith in the fundamentals. Moreover, the [composition of polling averages has considerably changed](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/upshot/polling-averages-midterm-election.html?te=1&nl=the-tilt&emc=edit_nc_20221106), with fewer “gold standard” polls and more quick-and-dirty ones that tend to show more favorable results for Republicans. [really is the whole ballgame](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-polling-error/), at least when it comes to which party keeps control of the Senate. (Perhaps they could hold on in Arizona and New Hampshire, but they’d be considerable underdogs in Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where they need to win two out of the three.)